Note that names that contain “Manage” or “Process” are generally poor names (but you see them a lot!)

Usually indicates a group of capabilities

Provide the business with a common vocabulary

Enable highly-focused investment decisions

Serve as a baseline for strategic planning, change management, and impact analysis

Serve as the basis for transformational design and deployment

Figure 1 Example

Identifying Business Capabilities

Build stakeholder experience maps

Identify touch points

Identify value-delivering capabilities

Identify supporting capabilities

Identify Touch Points and Value-Delivering Capabilities

Some people call these “core” capabilities, but they may or may not be. Core capabilities are those that distinguish one business from its competitors. In contrast, value-delivering capabilities are simply those that deliver value to an external stakeholder. Within a single industry, different businesses will have different core capabilities, even though they might have the same services and value-delivering capabilities.

A touch point is a point of interaction on an experience map

Each touch point is a business service provided by a capability

These are your value-delivering capabilities

These capabilities are supported by other capabilities, sometimes with time or other types of dependencies

Identify Supporting Capabilities

This is the easiest way to capture the entire scope of a capability model.

Support capabilities can be proprietary or generic

Proprietary work needs to be owned or licensed

Support capabilities should be owned only if it’s cheaper than buying it

Direct support capabilities help the value-delivering capabilities run more smoothly

Essential support capabilities are required in order to stay in business but don’t directly benefit the service delivery

IT can be direct support if it provides systems that directly support value-delivery (such as assist or deliver)

You may also find capabilities that do not appear on a map. These are prime candidates for elimination as they don’t provide value or support providing value to external stakeholders (so who benefits from them? You may have missed a stakeholder, too).

The Ishikawa (“fish bone”) diagram is a convenient way to indicate dependency of one capability on another

The value-delivering capability is the arrow

The branches are supporting capability upon which it depends

You can indicate the kind of dependency if desired

Many capabilities will show up on multiple fish bones as they support multiple touch points

Taken across all experience maps, these networks represent all of the capabilities you need to provide as a business

Service touch-points give you enabling or value-delivering capabilities

Build networks of supporting capabilities that deliver everything required to deliver the service

For example, to be able to sell an item to a customer in a store, the following process, among many others, need to have been completed:

You need a certain number of employees to be on the floor when the customer walks in

The product needs to be on the floor as well – this is the result of a whole host of merchandising and inventory capabilities

To get customers in the door, you probably had to do some marketing and create some offers

To know who to aim the offers at, you had to have a strategy and customer segments

To pull any of this off, you had to have financing

You need to be able to record the sale and use of inventory and to comply with all regulations and laws